Blizzard Bread

Well I don't think anyone is making any official estimates yet but my guess is that at least in our part of Philadelphia we've gotten about 48 inches of snow over the last 5 days. Today we both stayed home from work due to 'blizzard warnings.' I'm not sure I've ever even seen a blizzard warning in my 25+ years here. Blizzards occur in Chicago, where I used to live, or Ithaca, where I also used to live, but not in Philadelphia. I've forgotten what snow and winter really are due to my 25 years here.

But no more. This is real snow!

I don't think I've ever shown food on this blog before, and unless you can squeeze the wild yeasts of sourdough bread into the nature category food isn't really art, birds or nature. Sourdough needs to be fed in order to be used for baking. So you can't just say: hey I'll make some sourdough bread today! You need to feed your starter for a day or two.

I had been doing that and it was ready today. And I was home all day. So time to make some sourdough bread. In this case I decided to make foccaccia, loosely based on the recipe in my bible of sourdough baking, "Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery." The day many years ago when I decided to buy that book and learn to make sourdough bread was a life-changing experience. It took about 2 weeks to nurture my first starter so that it was strong enough to make bread. That was probably 10 years ago or so. Since then every winter is the time for sourdough bread.

But today I wanted to do something special: not just bread but foccaccia. Our cupboards are a bit bare so smoked turkey replaced anchovies, and cheddar cheese replaced Parmesan. Leftover broccoli raab, the last of some oil-cured olives and a lot of sesame seeds topped it off. A beautiful bread for the day of a blizzard.

Earlier in the day I worked on some dunlin sketches. I did live field sketches of these same birds at Bringantine NWR last October. But I had tremendous trouble with the slant of the bill in those sketches. Today I attempted to get a better sense of the bill and their overall structure. This is an exercise in learning as much as it is in art. Finally I turned to books by Charles Tunnicliffe, Eric Ennion and Roger Tory Peterson so see how the experts handled dunlins.

Finally a few photos of the snow. Just last weekend I posted a photo of our back yard and the snow on the lawn chair. Now the snow on the chair is almost twice as high and you almost can't see the chair!

Needless to say our birds are having a very hard time. The strong wind and snow instantly cover any food put on the ground and the feeders only hold so many birds. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better weather for the birds.

As for us I'm sure it's going to be one long, slow drive into work, if I can find the car in the snow.

It Wasn't Tunnicliffe...

At least I'm pretty sure it wasn't. I was flipping through famous British artist Charles Tunnicliffe's 'A Sketchbook of Birds' today. One of the works that particularly struck me was a watercolor of 10-15 Northern Pintails all in a group. It struck me as did all of his duck works because that's what I've been working with recently.

I think instead the real motivation behind the accompanying watercolor of 12 female Northern Pintails was just one of reaction. I couldn't stand doing any more detailed pencil work! Well not really. I've enjoyed it. But I did feel like doing some watercolors that almost by definition wouldn't be as detailed. So there are two here. The first one I did of two male Pintails is a quick 15-30 minute watercolor. I drew in the shapes loosely first. The second, and the one I'm particularly fond of, was done without pencil. I just started sketching in all of the ducks in very light watercolor lines. As it progressed I added more shape and darker color. It felt much more like painting and I thoroughly enjoyed it.